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Dave Cawley
brainiq hey, it's Dave Cawley. It's been a bit quiet around the Cold podcast feed lately, but I want to let you know a new season is in the works. The story is pretty wild. It involves somebody going to prison as a direct result of this show. I'll have more to share on that front in a few months. Meantime, the series I shared last year, Uinta Triangle, is available to binge. It's nine episodes, the perfect length if you have a summer road trip ahead. The Cold Team also produced nine bonus episodes for you into Triangle, which previously required a paid subscription, but no more. I'm dropping my three favorite Uinta Triangle bonus episodes here in the cold feed. You can find the rest by following Uinta Triangle for free on its own feed. Just search for Uinta Triangle, that's U I n T A triangle. Wherever you listen. Thanks as always for the support and for listening. I'm Dave Cawley and this is a bonus episode of you Went a Triangle. At the start of episode three, you heard a quote from a man named Connor Chapoose.
Larry Cespuch
A man might say he would be gone until the moon was full, and when that time came and he hadn't returned, then that would arouse some suspicion.
Dave Cawley
Those are Chappoose's words. But not his voice. The text comes from an interview conducted in 1960, about a year before Chappoose died. To bring them to life. I thought it important to find a voice actor who, like Connor Chappoose, is a Ute. So let me introduce you to that voice.
Larry Cespuch
My name is Larry Cespuch. It means white belly in our Ute language. It comes from my great, great grandpa, whose name that was. We all have Ute names, but that was his because he had a big white birthmark on his tummy.
Dave Cawley
The Ute language is today at risk of extinction. There aren't many fluent speakers left, the number dwindling with each passing generation. Larry is one of the few who remain.
Larry Cespuch
My Indian name is Ayepuch, which means young man. When I was probably about 10, 11, I made my first kill and it was a little buck, a little two point. Our tradition is you give that to an elder. So I gave that to my grandpa and he said, go take the eyeballs out of the skull. And anybody trying to do something like that, especially a little guy trying to do that, it was pretty tough. And then he said, okay, you go dig a hole. And he went out and he prayed with those eyes. And he said, you will be Ipwitch. You'll be a young man. You'll be like this deer throughout your life. You'll be able to see like this young one. You'll be able to move like this young one. And that's your name. Boerd Aipwitz. That's how I was given my name. I'm 73. I can still do things a 35 year old can do, if not better than him. I'm happy to be able to do that and be blessed with that name.
Dave Cawley
The story of Eric Robinson's disappearance takes place largely in the Uinta Mountains, a small piece of the homelands of Larry's ancestors.
Larry Cespuch
Right. The original homelands were pretty much from Bags, Wyoming down into Abiquiu, New Mexico, and of course all of Utah, about three quarters of Utah. Now.
Dave Cawley
The Utes are not a monoculture. They were historically comprised of many different bands spread across this vast region centered in modern day Colorado.
Larry Cespuch
I'm a white river. We call ourselves Wadu river because of the White river in Colorado. That's where we were before we, we were relocated here. And the name Ute comes about where, when the Spaniards came, they called us. Some say that Utah has something to do with the color of our skin because we were a little darker than most other tribes. But that's what they called us Utah and ute is shorter for the Spaniards calling us Utah.
Dave Cawley
During the mid-1800s, ute bands came into increasing conflict with white miners, ranchers and homesteaders. In 1868, several Ute bands signed a treaty with the US government. They gave up claim to lands in the eastern Rocky Mountains of Colorado and were in exchange, granted most of the West Slope. This was a huge expanse of land full of valuable Minerals. Only about 10 years later, an agent appointed by the federal government named Nathan Meeker arrived on this reservation. Meeker attempted to force the White River Utes to adopt a new way of life, giving up hunting in favor of farming. Missionaries were also pressing Utes to convert to Christianity and assimilate. Relations deteriorated, and The White River Utes sought help from Uray, who was chief of another Ute band.
Larry Cespuch
You hear it played on as have it our re like have it your way. Have it our way. But it means arrow in Ute arrow. And that's what Uray's name was. Urre, but everybody just called him Oray. Okay, but you'd say that Yuri. Yuri.
Dave Cawley
Chief Yuray or Yuri, had good relations with white officials, but was unable to convince them to replace Meeker. The crisis reached a breaking point, and Meeker summoned help from U.S. army troops stationed in Wyoming. Those troops entered the reservation and The White River Utes met them with armed resistance. The Utes rose up against Meeker, too, killing him and his staff and abducting several women and children. Colorado had only recently become a state at the time of what's now called the Meeker Incident. Its governor and other leaders responded by calling for the expulsion of the Utes. Chief Uray and his wife Chipita, traveled to Washington, D.C. against this backdrop, and in early 1880, they met with high government officials hoping to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis and to prevent the forced removal of their people. Chipita even testified before Congress about the Meeker incident, but to no avail. Congress issued a declaration banishing the Utes from almost all of their land in Colorado, forcing them onto much smaller reservations. The White River Utes were exiled to what is today the Uinta and Ore Reservation in Utah at the southern foot of the Uinta Mountains. It's the second largest Indian reservation in the United States by land mass, spanning more than 4.5 million acres. But only a fraction of that land actually belongs to the tribe today, and most people living within the reservation boundaries are not Utes. That's because the US government claimed a chunk of the land as national forest and opened the reservation to homesteaders.
Larry Cespuch
So there were 500 of our people, including my families, moved up to South Dakota to ask the Lakotas to come down and help rid us of the homesteaders. But they were worse off than we were.
Dave Cawley
I share all of this history with you because it explains why modern Utes live mostly in arid stretches away from the mountains their ancestors called home. It also explains the name of a significant landmark in the story of Eric Robinson's disappearance. Chipita Lake. The Chipita Lake trailhead is where Eric started his trek on the Uinta Highline Trail. I asked Larry if Chipita means anything in his language.
Larry Cespuch
Chipita was just her name.
Dave Cawley
The book, Utah Place Names, claims Chipita means rippling water.
Larry Cespuch
No, you'd have Pa in there somewhere. Pa is water, okay?
Dave Cawley
Other sources say Chipita means white singing bird. But this, too, is probably incorrect.
Larry Cespuch
To my knowledge, wasn't really anything particular what it meant.
Dave Cawley
Part of the challenge here is yud is a spoken language, not a written one. That means there was no Ute dictionary until Anglo ethnographers started trying to translate and record yud words and stories. The results were partial and sometimes conflicting. Making matters worse, different Ute bands spoke different dialects with no formalized pronunciation. And different Ute bands are today spread across three separate reservations, further fracturing their culture. The more common a Ute word is, the better chance it's had of being translated correctly. Take, for instance, the Ute word for bear, quiogat.
Larry Cespuch
That's the bear. We would follow him as soon as he came out of hibernation. And so whatever he ate was the medicines we used. There's a root that we call bareroot.
Dave Cawley
Bareroot, or osha, as it's sometimes called, is an herb native to the Rocky Mountains, where it grows in subalpine forest. That includes portions of the Uinta Mountains where ancestral youths would have hunted and gathered medicine.
Larry Cespuch
But it's for digestion. You can imagine what he feasted on. The bear would help calm it all down.
Dave Cawley
The word Uinta is often said to mean pine forest in the Ute language. Do you have a personal relationship with the Uinta Mountains?
Larry Cespuch
Well, the mountains to begin with are called ubwitu, and ubwitu means lodge pole pine. And there are some really magnificent lodgepole pine up there that we use for different ceremonies. Growing up here, you know, we spent lot of time up there. My stepdad pretty much showed us how to exist up there, how to hunt and fish and what we could eat. And so there are places I've fasted up there. Being one of the spiritual people, I fasted and so I know what is what up there. If I want deer and elk, if I want berries, if I want medicines, it's just like you would be going to town. You know, where the drug store is, the grocery store. Whatever you need is up there. And so if anything ever happened, that's where we're supposed to go and be able to survive. There is some prophecy that there will be this one big fire that will burn everybody the same, and the only beauty will be the beauty of the spirit and out of the rocks will come the Indian. That to me means that we're meant to go up into the hills. We know how to survive there and regardless what comes, we'll be able to make it. And that's how you survive.
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Dave Cawley
if you look at a map of the Uintah Mountains today, you'll see many peaks are named after the surveyors and scientists who helped map the American Ferdinand Hayden, John Wesley Powell, Samuel Franklin, Emmons Grove, Carl Gilbert, Clarence King. Fewer places have names drawn from the Ute language. Chipita Lake I already mentioned, but there's also Tocawana Peak, supposedly from a Ute word meaning peace. Then there's oh, Weep Creek and the Oweep Basin.
Larry Cespuch
Oweep. I've heard it in some some words, but it's not a standalone.
Dave Cawley
Here I must acknowledge my pronunciation of Owepe must grate on Larry's ears.
Larry Cespuch
I respect you more for trying than not.
Dave Cawley
The book Utah Place Names claims Oweep means grass. That's probably close, though imprecise. I've found another source that offers similar sounding words for grass, grain, and wheat. More recent Uinta maps also include a very significant Yudsenoiv Senoev is creator, a deity who in the stories of the Utes, made the sun, the moon, the earth, and all mankind. Larry learned these stories from a young age as they were passed down by his relatives.
Larry Cespuch
My mom and dad split up when I was probably about three. My dad was in the Korean War, so he drank a lot when he came back and she didn't like that. So they split up and so we primarily lived with my grandma, and my uncle took me under his wing and taught me stories. Also taught me how to sing and how to dance. I used to follow him like a duckling and so my grandma, she was the one who taught me most of the stories. And so I'm just a kid playing around. And she didn't say, sit down here and listen, I've got something to tell you. No, it wasn't that way. It was when she knew that she pretty much had my ear. She would say, listen, I'm going to tell you something long time ago. And she would say this in utech, and she'd talk about Coyote and whatever he did. But I'd be over here playing, and I would catch it enough to where I was curious, what'd you say? Or what did he do?
Dave Cawley
Yagovich the coyote is the younger sibling of Senoiv. Coyote's a trickster who delights in causing chaos. One of those stories young Larry learned, involved Senoiv's creation of humankind. It goes something like this. Senoiv gathered twigs from all the different trees and placed them into a magic bag. The Creator planned to take these twigs, representing all the different races, and distribute them each in their own place around the world. Now, this required great effort, and Senoev became tired and went to rest. Meanwhile, Yagovich the coyote felt a tickle of curiosity. He saw that bag, its contents writhing and wriggling, and wanted to know what was inside. So Yagovich cut a hole in the bag to peek. But people came pouring out, all in a jumble. Try as he might, Yugovich couldn't catch them all or get them back into the bag. Realizing he was in trouble, Yugovich ran off to hide. When Senoev awoke and returned to the bag, he found just one group of people still inside. They were the ute who the Creator placed high in the mountains. I don't tell that story nearly as well as Larry does, and many years have passed since Larry first heard his grandmother telling the story. But he committed it and many others to memory.
Larry Cespuch
I understand my role is I'm a messenger. Growing up as a kid, I used to carry a little point and shoot camera. And so I've got a lot of old black and white photos. And then when I ended up in Vietnam, I was a radioman in Vietnam. I told the Creator, you get me through this, I will be your servant. There's a number of times I should have gone on to the next happy hunting grounds, but I went on to art school and changed over to communications, went on to film school.
Dave Cawley
Through all of this, Larry found his own voice. He became an editor of the tribal newspaper, served as the tribe's public relations officer. And founded a film production studio. He also came to realize many Utes were losing touch with their heritage.
Larry Cespuch
Somebody said, well, who knows the creation story? And nobody knew it. And I said, I know it.
Dave Cawley
Larry started sharing the stories he had learned as a boy, keeping alive that tradition of oral storytelling. There's a YouTube video of a TEDx talk he gave several years ago that's garnered nearly half a million views. In it, Larry talks of Senoiv gathering the twigs and Kirius Yagovich cutting open the bag. I've heard variations on this tale. The gist is the same, but the details differ. That's just the nature of oral tradition.
Larry Cespuch
So sometimes they may change a little. But I was told that that's okay because I'm always counting on Creator to keep me on track. And there's times that I listen to stuff that comes out of me and I'm going, wow. Because it's not me. And I'm just very grateful that I'm allowed to play that part.
Dave Cawley
Larry telling this story on a stage in front of cameras is a much different experience from how he first heard the stories in his grandmother's home from
Larry Cespuch
back when they told it to now. Things have changed completely. So you add your little things. Things. But don't lose the base moral of the story.
Dave Cawley
What do you feel like the moral is of the Yuk creation story?
Larry Cespuch
Moral is all creation stories, they tell where you came from, how you came to be. And so everybody has a starting point. And if you don't know where you came from or how you came to be there, then you're lost already.
Dave Cawley
I find myself thinking about this in the context of Eric Robinson. When I set out to tell Eric's story, I didn't know about the life he had led prior to his arrival at the start of the Uintah Highline Trail. Only by learning about his origin and the path that brought him to the Uinta Mountains could I begin to understand the significance of his story. I've learned and grown so much through this process, and I hope you feel the same by the time we reach the end of Eric's trail. As a person who speaks for a living, a storyteller, if I might be so bold, such as yourself, I feel like that's the power of story as well.
Larry Cespuch
Oh, sure.
Dave Cawley
To share with people who might not get the experience.
Larry Cespuch
Oh, yeah, yeah. I watch, watch people's eyes when I tell stories, and I know when I'm connected. And it's those kind of times, too, that whatever comes out of here is not me, but I'm watching all of the dazzle and I'm going dang. I'm just very fortunate to be able to see this and experience this and this is what I was meant for. We find ourselves wherever we are for a reason and so if it helps you have a broader viewpoint, open mind. That's what it's all about. That's all knowledge. We gain something rather than stay closed.
Dave Cawley
My thanks to Larry Cespuch for sharing about his life, his language and his love for wild places. This bonus episode was produced by me, Dave Cawley. Our executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittleswax for lemonada Media and Cheryl Worsley for KSL Podcasts. For more on the story of Uinta Triangle, visit our website@uintatriangle.com that's uinta spelled uint uinta. Thank you for listening.
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Release Date: May 20, 2026
Host: Dave Cawley
Guest: Larry Cespuch
This bonus episode of Cold, sourced from the Uinta Triangle series, is a rich exploration of Ute culture, language, and history—framed through the voice and stories of Larry Cespuch, a White River Ute and one of the few remaining fluent speakers of the Ute language. In the context of the Eric Robinson disappearance case (which took place on ancestral Ute land), host Dave Cawley traces how the landscape, local place names, and storytelling traditions reveal deeply-rooted meanings that remain largely invisible to outsiders. The episode also spotlights ongoing challenges to Ute cultural survival and the crucial role of oral tradition in preserving knowledge.
“My name is Larry Cespuch. It means white belly in our Ute language. It comes from my great, great grandpa ... because he had a big white birthmark on his tummy.” – Larry Cespuch (02:38)
The naming of places (e.g., Chipita Lake) often disconnected from actual Ute meanings; host and guest clarify linguistic misconceptions (09:35–09:56):
“Chipita was just her name.” – Larry Cespuch (09:35) “The book, Utah Place Names, claims Chipita means rippling water ... No, you'd have Pa in there somewhere. Pa is water, okay?” – Larry Cespuch (09:44)
The meaning and adaptation of other Ute words for local landmarks, and the challenges caused by dialect diversity and Anglo ethnographers’ partial records (10:01, 16:09).
“The bear would help calm it all down.” – Larry Cespuch (11:08)
“Whatever you need is up there. And so if anything ever happened, that's where we're supposed to go and be able to survive.” – Larry Cespuch (12:24)
“The Creator planned to take these twigs, representing all the different races, and distribute them each in their own place around the world. ... Yagovich cut a hole in the bag to peek. But people came pouring out, all in a jumble.” – Dave Cawley (18:17)
“Somebody said, well, who knows the creation story? And nobody knew it. And I said, I know it.” – Larry Cespuch (20:33)
“So sometimes they may change a little. But I was told that that's okay because I'm always counting on Creator to keep me on track.” — Larry Cespuch (21:09) “But don't lose the base moral of the story.” – Larry Cespuch (21:44)
The importance of knowing one's origin in cultural stories as well as in unfolding true crime investigations like Eric Robinson’s (22:04):
“If you don't know where you came from or how you came to be there, then you're lost already.” – Larry Cespuch (22:04)
Dave draws a parallel between the search for personal/cultural origin and the need to understand Eric Robinson’s backstory to appreciate his disappearance (22:24):
The impact of storytelling on listeners and the storyteller alike (23:00):
“I watch people's eyes when I tell stories, and I know when I'm connected.” – Larry Cespuch (23:03) “We find ourselves wherever we are for a reason and so if it helps you have a broader viewpoint, open mind. That's what it's all about.” – Larry Cespuch (23:03)
“We all have Ute names ... I'm 73. I can still do things a 35-year-old can do, if not better. I'm happy to be able to do that and be blessed with that name.” – Larry Cespuch (03:08)
“I'm a messenger ... There's a number of times I should have gone on to the next happy hunting grounds, but I went on to art school and changed over to communications, went on to film school.” – Larry Cespuch (19:40)
“Somebody said, well, who knows the creation story? And nobody knew it. And I said, I know it.” – Larry Cespuch (20:33)
“I watch people's eyes when I tell stories, and I know when I'm connected. ... I'm just very fortunate to be able to see this and experience this and this is what I was meant for.” – Larry Cespuch (23:03)
| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:38 | Larry Cespuch introduces his Ute name and its origin. | | 04:30 | Scene setting: Eric Robinson’s disappearance and Ute homelands. | | 05:48 | Ute history: treaties, Meeker Incident, and forced relocation. | | 09:35 | Clarification of Ute place names and misconceptions. | | 11:27 | Larry’s personal account of life and ceremony in the Uinta mountains. | | 17:00 | The Ute creation story and teachings on Yagovich and Senoiv. | | 20:33 | Larry shares his journey as a cultural messenger. | | 22:04 | The moral of creation stories – the importance of knowing one’s origin.| | 23:03 | Reflections on the role and impact of storytelling. |
This episode offers a rare, intimate immersion into Ute heritage and worldview, with language and landscapes brought to life by Larry Cespuch. Listeners gain not only the historical context behind place names and the Ute people's contemporary challenges but also experience the vibrant force of oral storytelling. Ultimately, the episode suggests that whether in the search for a missing person or in understanding a culture, we cannot comprehend a story’s meaning unless we know where it begins—and who has kept it alive.